Jumat, 07 Agustus 2015

Give Your Marijuana to the Church: A Story of Stewardship

Give Your Marijuana to the Church: A Story of Stewardship

“We decided that any conversation about giving should start not with need but with abundance.”

One
doesn’t have to look far online to find a host of troubling statistics
about the dire state of faith-based giving in America. A recent Huffington Post
headline trumpets: “Church Giving Down to Depression-Era Lows.”
According to another report on ChurchLeaders.com, the situation is even
worse than that. During the Great Depression, Christians gave an average
of 3.3 percent of their incomes. In 2011 they gave a meager 2.5
percent. Even more concerning is a second figure reported by the same
article: 33-50 percent of church members give nothing at all.
And, while hand-wringing and flop sweating can be found in abundance,
what is harder to find are pastors and churches with practical
solutions to the problem. (Besides simply badgering their congregations
to “give more. Give more! No seriously … GIVE MORE!”)
This was the challenge facing the team at The Rock Church in Point
Loma, Calif., in the fall of 2010. Having grown from 0 to 12,000+ in
only a decade, The Rock was one of the fastest growing churches in
America. This growth, however, did not insulate The Rock from the
financial difficulties facing churches around the nation. If anything,
it only compounded the issues created by diminished giving.
Saddled with a sizeable mortgage but committed to making an impact
for The Kingdom throughout San Diego County, the team at The Rock began
brainstorming ways to engage their congregation on the subject of giving
without peppering every service with repeated appeals for increased
giving. They wanted to talk about stewardship—particularly sacrificial
stewardship—without any of the guilt or awkwardness that the subject so
often elicits.
“We live in one of the wealthiest cities in America,” says James
Lawrence, The Rock’s Chief of Staff. “Because of that, we decided that
any conversation about giving should start not with need but with
abundance. We wanted people to start thinking ‘look how much I have’
instead of ‘look how much the church needs.’”
Changing the conversation, however, was only the first step.
According to Lawrence, the greater challenge was to help people put
their intentions into action.
“Getting people to view their purchases as an opportunity for
generosity is great, but what good is it if they are not able to respond
in the moment?” asks Lawrence. “We needed a way for our members to take
action whenever and wherever the opportunity to give presented itself.”
As it happens, a solution was already waiting for them. Around this
same time, The Rock was in the process of transitioning their online
giving over to Mogiv,
a cloud based electronic giving system for churches and nonprofits. In
addition to providing a host of essential digital giving features (i.e.,
scheduled giving, multiple campaigns, embeddable giving forms, mobile
giving, etc.), the Mogiv system also included a built-in feature that
would enable members to give not only quickly and securely, but
sacrificially as well.
With this feature (called “GivUp”), a giver could simply text the
name of an item they wanted to sacrifice as well as the dollar amount of
that item to a special address provided by the church. Following a
brief confirmation process, their gift would be processed alongside a
record of what they had “given up” for the church.
With the GivUp tool at their disposal, The Rock challenged their
congregation to begin thinking critically about their consumption
habits. Where was their money being spent? What things were needs and
what things were merely wants? What things might they be willing to do
without in order to dedicate more of their resources to the work of The
Kingdom?
Using bulletin inserts, graphics and announcements on Sunday morning,
The Rock’s team introduced The GivUp Challenge to the congregation.
They then sat back and waited to see who—if anyone—would respond. They
didn’t have to wait long. Before the service was even over, GivUp gifts
started flying in. They haven’t stopped since.
From spa weekends to breakfast burritos, from fancy dinners and new
wardrobes to frozen yogurt and golf outings—the list of things “given
up” over the past four years by The Rock’s congregation now stretches to
nearly 2,000 items.
Some people found basic, everyday purchases that they could do
without. $3.50 for Starbucks; $5.00 for a week’s worth of snacks from
the vending machine; $10.00 for a movie.
For others, the sacrifice had a higher price tag. $200 for an
afternoon of hair and nail maintenance; $500 from a pay raise; $4,000
that had been earmarked for new wood floors in a member’s house. A pair
of candid givers even gave up items rarely associated with the Sunday
morning collection plate: $200.00 for alcohol and $25.00 for marijuana.
“I think it’s safe to say even the most optimistic of us were amazed
by the response,” says Lawrence. “While the campaign was going on, we
would put a list of items people had sacrificed that week up on the
screen during the offering, which in turn provided a great teaching
opportunity. The ability to connect the concept of stewardship with
tangible items that we consume every week continues to impact the way we
talk about giving at our church.”
Matt Hayes, a co-founder at Mogiv and one of the architects of the
GivUp feature, says that this connection between buying and giving is
the very thing that led his team to create the GivUp tool in the first
place.
“Look at the way generosity is described in the Old Testament,” says
Hayes. “People would bring fruit, grain, livestock and other valuables
into the temple. I think giving was so much more concrete back then.
Today, I’m obviously not going to put the lunches or lattes I’ve skipped
into the plate on Sunday morning, but GivUp is a way of modeling that
same behavior in our digital age.”
While advising against viewing technology as a “magic bullet,” Mr.
Hayes went on to say that churches need to be more creative in how they
think and talk about stewardship.
“The same techniques that worked 20 and even 10 years ago, may not
work today,” says Hayes. “The Rock is a great example of this. Their
willingness to embrace a new giving channel and to combine that channel
with a compelling message of ‘radical generosity’ has impacted far more
than their bottom line. It’s changed the hearts and attitudes of their
givers. And isn’t that what it’s about anyway?”
Looking beyond the specific circumstances at The Rock, Mr. Lawrence
said he believes the response of The Rock’s congregation can serve as an
encouragement to other churches as it indicates a solution that is
programmatic or technologic as opposed to spiritual or generational.
Churchgoers want to give. Church leaders simply need to find the tools
and messaging that will help their members capitalize on their best
intentions.
Whether or not The Rock’s story is prescriptive or merely anecdotal,
it is—at the very least—an encouraging data point for anyone depressed
over the troublesome state of religious giving today. And it couldn’t
come at a better time. With giving to American churches trending
downward for the fourth consecutive year, there will certainly be dozens
of churches facing difficult decisions in the months ahead. It is
heartening to see what can be accomplished when a congregation tries
“giving up” before they give up.

Nathan R. Elson
is a Christ follower, relentlessly obsessed with “better” and on a
mission to see everyone around him be the best version of themselves. He
serves businesses, non-profits, and churches around the world with
branding, technology, and communications. More from Nathan Elson or visit Nathan at http://nathanrelson.com/